Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo
Elizabeth Warren speaks to supporters in Monterey Park on Monday night.
MONTEREY PARK, CALIFORNIA – Approximately 3,000 fans at East Los Angeles Community College, many of them young and Latino, took a history class with Elizabeth Warren on Monday night. The lesson plan highlighted the famous SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign, initiated a few miles away in Los Angeles by immigrant women from Mexico and Central America.
“Latinx and Chicano history teaches us the power of fighting back,” Warren said in a voice that strained slightly after weeks, months, and years of campaigning. “We face an uphill battle but we cannot allow our fear to consume us.”
It was a cathartic speech for the audience, and it may have been the last speech Warren gives as an active candidate for president. There was a sense of closure in it, maybe more than her committed supporters understood. This was perhaps the final in a series of orations about women-led organizing and resistance to corporate, wealthy, male-dominated oppression throughout U.S. history, from the Bread and Roses movement in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to the immigrant survivors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, to the black washerwomen strike in Atlanta in 1881. They tell the collective story of persistence, of rejecting appeals to sit down and stop fighting, and winning.
Especially for someone who built a brand on the same spirit, I imagine it’s hard to decide that it must end. How do you bow out, at what empirically feels like the beginning of the journey? How does a movement designed to defy powerful men who put boundaries around the possible give way to an all-male contest?
Yet if you move out of narrative and into mathematics, I don’t really know what the Warren campaign is trying to achieve right now. She sits a distant third in the delegate count, and after tonight—by which point 20 of the 57 states and territories will have voted—that gap will widen. Forecasting does not favor Warren winning any states tomorrow, including her hometown Massachusetts, and the FiveThirtyEight analysis only has her as high as second in Vermont and Utah. Her campaign manager has spun a fanciful story about hanging around as a compromise candidate for the convention, as if it’s 1924 and her name is John W. Davis.
California does not differ much from this cold reality, though the campaign believes it will secure a lot of delegates here. At a get-out-the-vote canvass at community organizer Amanda Knottke’s home in Venice, which has served as a satellite campaign office since last August, canvass leaders stressed how many undecided voters they needed to persuade. The opportunity to pull in support is only compounded by the early exits of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, who did occupy a similar “wine track” as Warren.
But the Sanders team has knocked on 1.1 million doors in California as of Saturday, 500,000 in Los Angeles County alone. They held marches to the polls this weekend (as early voting stations were open throughout the county), a Pied Piper action where supporters sought out bystanders to vote with them. “We’re doing what organizers do,” said Melissa Byrne, a statewide organizer who has lived here for months. “We fight until we win.”
And Sanders is going to win California, if polls are any indication. Warren is locked in battle with a resurgent Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg that could land her as far back as fourth, out of four major candidates. (I’ve personally received at least ten Bloomberg mailers, and no other political mail; the no-information voter, at least, is only hearing one conversation.)
Even the community that Warren celebrated last night—young Latinos—have generally flocked to Sanders, thanks to deep and sustained organizing. Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), introduced Warren at the rally, but took pains to say she was doing so in her personal capacity. Warren has excited many leaders but made only shallow in-roads with the communities they represent.
Katie Porter, the first-term congresswoman who has become a viral star for interrogating witnesses in hearings in a fashion reminiscent of Warren, her former teacher, rallied the troops at the canvass, and she gamely gave me the pitch. “Everyone’s wringing their hands about what does the presidential mean for down-ticket candidates,” she told me. “I’m standing here as a really powerful example that running on progressive values and running with Elizabeth’s help? That is a way to flip seats.”
When I ask about people who see the state of the primary and want to boost the most progressive candidate, she said, “That way of thinking I think can be incredibly dangerous to get involved in. Because you’re essentially allowing others to hijack what is your voice in our democracy ... if [voters] believe [Warren is] going to be the best president, and she is, then they need to be making that vote.”
That point is worth unpacking. Elizabeth Warren has been campaigning to prove that she would be the best president. She hired a gargantuan policy staff, churned out a bunch of white papers, and reacted to events in real time, continuing with her plan to take action on coronavirus, which reads more like legislation that needs to be passed immediately in the House than a platform plank. Her series of speeches sought to educate, to unearth a hidden history about feminist power against institutional forces, aiming to seed lessons about how she can deliver change, through persistence, planning, and movement-building.
But Warren has not really run a campaign to win the nomination. Every political maneuver has fallen flat, thanks in part to a campaign where the policy people run the show and the lead-footed political staff defer. Her missteps on Medicare for All financing (which the campaign is belatedly trying to turn into a strength) represented a political failure to anticipate the importance of health care to the Democratic electorate. The bizarre “third-way” politics, positioning Warren as an alternative to democratic socialism and the status quo, has left both sides mostly cold, and is not reflective of what has made her shine in politics.
In the last month, Warren signature moments came when she was fighting, mostly against Bloomberg and his plutocratic boorishness. “Where was that Elizabeth Warren” has been a familiar refrain. Last night, Warren again launched an attack, this time on Joe Biden. After congratulating his South Carolina victory and decades of service, she leaned in:
… no matter how many Washington insiders tell you to support him, nominating their fellow Washington insider will not meet this moment. Nominating a man who says we do not need any fundamental change in this country will not meet this moment. Nominating someone who wants to restore the world before Donald Trump, when the status quo has been leaving more and more people behind for decades, is a big risk for our party and our country.
But then she returned to the unity theme, saying that the party was re-fighting 2016 with “another primary along the same lanes … One for an insider, one for an outsider. Democratic voters should have more choice than that. America needs more choice than that.”
Democratic voters have shown no interest in more choices, for better or worse. I don’t believe in telling anyone to exit a race. It doesn’t work, anyway; politicians have their own timetables and thought processes. But Warren can draw from the lessons she identified in the Justice for Janitors movement. “Anyone who wants real change needs allies, partners, and a winning coalition,” she said. At this moment, if she believes in real change, she has to find a partner. To soldier on, isolated and without a path, would be a betrayal of what she stood for in this campaign.
As I walked back to my car, I passed a “Karaoke for Warren” booth fashioned out of a van. Inside, supporters sung the Alanis Morissette classic “You Oughta Know.” It sounded like an outpouring of rage. The Warren campaign, in its better moments, embodied a rage to change the power structure, to wrest power from those who have too much of it. But there’s only one way left to do that now.
